Network operators/carriers have the will and the resources to fix the wireless network overload problem. However, the increased availability of free applications only makes network congestion worse with constant signaling from the application to the application stores and/or advertiser websites.
There are several types of congestion that impact congestion in wireless networks, including: application congestion which is created by applications using keep-alives, Ajax-style push, e.g., “long-poll”, or periodically checking for changes from a back-end server; geographic congestion which is caused by when there are too many devices in the network co-located, each requesting access to a data channel, and; behavioral congestion which is caused by an over anxious or power user who is manually attempting to constantly refresh content through the browser or other application either in response to a network based service being unreachable (e.g., the act of refreshing until content is reachable) or due the users desire to check for an up to the minute change. Most of these requests result in no useful data or repeated data transferred from the back-end server.
In mobile or wireless networks, specifically, where access to the data channel is negotiated with each request after the radio has transitioned to the idle state, not only floods the network with “channel acquisition requests” (flooding the control channel) potentially blocking other devices from network access (the control channel has limited bandwidth) but also holding the radio on for longer periods of time for data that is providing no useful value. This results in excess data transfer and shortening the already problematic battery life of mobile devices such as super phones, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other wireless devices/clients.